Bitcoin Bull Michael Saylor Says Bitcoin Could Fight Cyberattacks Against Ukraine

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Saylor explains how Bitcoin can be used to counter distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks like those crippling Ukraine.

Key points On Friday, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor told CNBC Crypto World how Bitcoin could be deployed against the growing use of DDoS attacks similar to what Ukraine is facing.Media reports find that Ukraine’s government, contractors, and banks have been targeted with denial-of -service malware in recent days.

During a televised interview Friday, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor told CNBC Crypto World how the cryptocurrency Bitcoin could be a useful tool to prevent cyberattacks similar to those currently being launched against Ukraine.

Saylor is a diehard Bitcoin bull and has been for years. In regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission made in December, his enterprise analytics company, Microstrategy, announced that it had purchased 1,434 more Bitcoin for $57,477, with a total price tag of $82.4 million.

That brought his company’s total holdings of Bitcoin to 122,478 coins, making MicroStrategy the largest non-crypto-exchange, corporate owner of Bitcoin in the world. MicroStrategy’s holdings are more than three times the number of Bitcoin held by the next closest corporate investor, Tesla, which reportedly has 38,300 Bitcoin on its balance sheet. So Saylor knows what he’s talking about when he comes to this particular asset.

How Bitcoin could be an effective against cyberattack

In fact, it’s Saylor’s expertise and belief in the Bitcoin technology that drives his compelling use case of Bitcoin as a weapon against cybercriminals, especially in light of a Wall Street Journal article on Friday that described hackers targeting the Ukrainian government, its contractors, and state -owned banks with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) malware that took down websites.

“The massive amounts of cyber attacks being launched on Ukraine right now — they’re all denial of service attacks. Denial of service attacks occur when someone hits your website with 15 million requests in an hour. [Attackers] can do that because it doesn’t cost them a dollar per request or $10 per request,” Saylor said in the televised report.

To combat DDoS attacks, Saylor suggests requiring a very small amount of Bitcoin subunits called “Satoshis” be paid upfront by any user of a social media or online account. As background, every Bitcoin is composed of 100 million “Satoshis,” so their value is very small, but they serve as a divisible unit of Bitcoin to facilitate transactions.

Saylor says all social media platforms should require all users to make an initial sign-up payment of 10 Satoshis, which is the equivalent of half a US penny at the time of writing, for each account. He says that would end pre-programmed DDoS attacks because to overwhelm a server, hackers create software that automatically spawns tens of thousands of new accounts every 10 minutes to flood the target channel and shut it down.

“If you did that, it would cost [attackers] $40 million dollars a day to launch that attack instead of nothing. The compelling application of Bitcoin, is that it’s a layer of ‘monetary energy’ that can be overlaid onto the digital layer of information of the current generation of the Internet.”

What would it take to deploy Bitcoin as a defense against cyberattacks?

This is the first time anyone has publicly suggested, during a major media interview, using Bitcoin technology as a defensive countermeasure to any type of cyberattack. Saylor said the nominal amount of Satoshis needed to set up internet accounts for everyday, law-abiding users would be so minimal as to not deter them from making the auto payment.

It would, however, prevent bad actors from being able to execute high-volume attacks due to the excessive upfront cost. According to a report from Cloudflare, ransom DDoS attacks increased by almost a third between 2020 and 2021 and jumped by 75% in Q4 2021 compared to the previous three months.

Adoption of this novel Bitcoin approach to combat DDoS exploitation would not require any type of government authorization or action, but would rather require adoption by website owners the same way that virtually every website now requires a “CAPTCHA” test to authenticate users are not software bots . A crypto-linked financial “CAPTCHA” function could allow people to pay with an existing credit or debit card and auto-convert the currency to Satoshis.

This is a provocative idea whose time — and technological feasibility — has come.

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